As India prepared to shock the world's balance of power
with nuclear tests on May 11, the CIA's analytical division went through the bureaucratic
routines of daily life: no late-night burning of the candles, no urgent warnings to the
White House, effectively no clue.

The Indian explosion caught the CIA and the Clinton
administration flat-footed, even though India's new Hindu nationalist ruling party had
publicly declared its intention to go nuclear. The CIA analysts apparently lulled
themselves to sleep with a reassuring group think that the new government wasn't serious.

But that blindness stands now as possibly the most serious
intelligence failure since the CIA largely missed the coming collapse of the Soviet Union
in the late 1980s. The Indian nuclear tests -- followed by similar tests in Pakistan --
mean three bordering states in Asia have the capability to devastate one another with
nuclear weapons, with virtually no protection of an early warning system.

The third nation, China, has enjoyed the additional benefit
of U.S. free-trade cooperation in the refinement of its missile-delivery systems. Like the
Bush administration before it, the Clinton administration bowed to the desires of U.S.
corporations which have found Chinese missiles an inexpensive alternative for launching
commercial satellites.

In short, the South Asia nuclear club represents the
greatest threat to world security since the end of the Cold War, while CIA analysts
blissfully brown-bagged-it for lunch, took their coffee breaks and didn't miss their car
pools.

On June 2, in a blunt report on the CIA's analytical
skills, retired Adm. David E. Jeremiah, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
declared that U.S. intelligence "needs to be scrubbed," from top to bottom, from
senior analysts to agents in the field. To avoid the kind of false consensus that had
blinded the analysts on India, Jeremiah argued, "you need to have a contrarian
view."

But there is a reason why the CIA analytical division has
lost that "contrarian view," a proud part of an older tradition in which
analysts had the professional confidence to contest the conventional wisdom and bring bad
news to policy-makers. That dissent within the CIA was beaten out of the analytical
division during the early 1980s when President Reagan insisted that his Evil Empire vision
be accepted -- and President Clinton failed to correct the problem when he took over in
1993.

Indeed, the current CIA crisis can be traced to those two
major intelligence developments: first, in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration
conducted an ideological purge of the analytical division to install compliant
bureaucrats, and second, in 1993, when Clinton ignored a clear warning that the CIA's
analytical division was in desperate need of reform.

During the Clinton transition, former CIA analysts lobbied
the incoming Clinton team to take immediate action. On Dec. 10, 1992, ex-analyst Peter W.
Dickson sent a bluntly worded two-page memo to Samuel "Sandy" Berger, who was
then a top figure on the national security transition team. (He is now Clinton's national
security adviser.)

Dickson recommended that Clinton appoint a CIA director who
grasped "the deeper internal problems relating to the politicization of intelligence
and the festering morale problem within the CIA. ... This problem of intellectual
corruption will not disappear overnight, even with vigorous remedial action.

"However, the new CIA director will be wise if he
realizes from the start the dangers in relying on the advice of senior CIA office managers
who during the past 12 years advanced and prospered in their careers precisely because
they had no qualms about suppressing intelligence or slanting analysis to suit the
interest of [CIA director William J.] Casey and [his deputy Robert] Gates. This is a deep
systemic problem."

In view of the recent CIA failures, Dickson's memo has the
ring of prophecy. Dickson himself had been a "contrarian" analyst who worked on
nuclear proliferation issues. He encountered resistance within the Casey-Gates system when
he pressed concerns about nuclear developments in Pakistan at a time when Pakistan was
assisting the CIA's covert war in Afghanistan. Dickson suffered direct retaliation after
refusing to rewrite a 1983 assessment that noted Soviet restraint on nuclear
proliferation, when that conflicted with Reagan's propaganda line of a reckless and
aggressive Soviet Union.

In the early 1990s, other ex-analysts joined Dickson in
decrying the impact of Reagan's "politicization" of the analytical division.
Former senior analyst Melvyn Goodman raised the issue publicly during Gates's 1991
confirmation hearings to be CIA director. Another former analyst, John A. Gentry, outlined
the decay in his 1993 book, Lost Promise: How CIA Analysis Misserves the Nation.

But Clinton, preoccupied with domestic policy, chose to
look the other way. To avoid a confrontation with Republicans, he picked as his first CIA
director neo-conservative James Woolsey, who had worked closely with the Reagan-Bush
administrations. The Woolsey appointment effectively guaranteed that the Casey-Gates
management team would consolidate its power over the analytical division.

To this day, the key officials overseeing the analytical
division can trace their rise to power to appointments from Casey and Gates in the early
1980s. This Casey-Gates clique includes John McLaughlin, deputy director for intelligence;
David Carey, the CIA's executive director; Winston Wiley, associate deputy director for
intelligence; and John Gannon, chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

Over the past 15 years, these senior bureaucrats also have
trained a younger generation of analysts who learned quickly the dangers of independent
thinking in a "politicized" bureaucracy. "Contrarian" viewpoints were
clearly not helpful to a young analyst's career advancement.

According to one former analyst, "the window for
trying to fix this mess was open when Clinton came in, but he was scared [to confront the
CIA]. Once, he put Woolsey out there, it was lost."

When I interviewed, Dickson, Goodman and Gentry last fall,
they were in agreement that Clinton had failed to rebuild the CIA's earlier traditions of
analytical independence. "He blew it," declared Dickson. Goodman said:
"Clinton missed an opportunity to get the CIA on the right track." Gentry added:
"You're 15 years into decay" and all the Clinton appointees have done is
"fussed around at the margins."

More recently, Dickson told me that the passage of time and
continued bureaucratic complacency also worked against any serious CIA reform.
"Unless there's another Pearl Harbor, who cares?" he asked rhetorically.

With the Asian sub-continent now armed to the nuclear
teeth, maybe the policy-makers finally will listen -- and admit that the mistakes of the
last 15 years were bipartisan. But the tougher question is whether they have the political
courage to bring back the analysts purged during the Reagan years and to re-establish the
division's once-treasured "contrarian view."